A Moment of Change
by thecivilunrest
Summary: Time can tear you apart. Post 'Failsafe'. Wally/Artemis


**Disclaimer: **I don't own _Young Justice _or the lyrics that I stole from OneRepublic's _All We Are. _That song is _so _Wally/Artemis. I love it.

**A/N: **I don't even know, guys._ I don't even know_. Everything seems to want to be Wally/Artemis lately. This started out as a Roy/Donna fic but then I don't even know what happened! That happened with the AU I'm writing (not the Glee!verse one). It was going to be both Wally/Artemis and Roy/Jade but then the Roy/Jade storyline kind of faded away. I don't even know how that happened either. But anyway, please review!

_A Moment of Change_

He was tired and sore. His left leg hurt like no other, but every time that Wally tried to move his toes he couldn't do it. That worried him, more than he would have liked to admit. You can't run, can't even stand, without toes. He was walking, though, and he comforted himself with that.

Wally didn't exactly know why he was going down this hallway, but he was. The walls were white and crisp, the floors marble and smooth. And it was quiet. Too quiet, the kind of quiet that reverberated off walls and echoed in his ears. The kind of quiet that he'd normally try to fill, but this seemed to be too powerful for even him to try to push back.

He went on anyway, pushing forward at a normal speed, his boots leaving behind him a slug's trail of grime. Wally thought he could tell that there was blood and mud there, and maybe a few remnants of gravel, but he can't tell what else.

There was a door at the end of the hallway, and he knew that was where he was going. He didn't question it, didn't wonder what drew him to that door. It was just where he had to go, and he was going there. Simple as that, really. He didn't know why he wasn't going full speed, this place creeped him out, made him wonder what it was doing to him.

The door didn't have a handle, and it was smooth under his palms, his gloves had been ripped off at some point in time;he didn't remember when. His hands left a stain made of the same stuff that were on his boots. He pushed open the door-he barely had to give any effort at all. The door opened as though it was simply attuned to his thoughts.

The sight of the room in front of him made his heart race, for reasons that he didn't know. The room was dimly lit, and there were shiny, silver tables everywhere. The gleam coming off the silver tables-it was a faint sheen and he knew that if all the lights were on that he'd be blinded. There was one table in the middle of all of the neat, evenly spaced, rows that was covered with a sheet.

Underneath the sheet was a shape, something that stuck out at certain placed and curved in at others, but he wasn't sure what it was. The thing under the sheet was what had been drawing him to this place, he was sure of it. So he kept going toward it, step by laborious step, until he managed to get right in front of it.

Wally didn't like not know what was underneath the sheet so he grabbed one of the sides of it, feeling the cotton beneath fingertips. He left a smear there as well; everything he touched here got stained. He took a deep breath before ripping off the sheet.

His eyes were closed, he had them shut tight, but he took another deep breath and opened them.

It was Artemis. The thing underneath the sheet had been Artemis.

Her costume was dirty, the same filth that was on his hands and boots on her, but her face was clean, as was her hair. It was everywhere, around her shoulders and the table. She looked peaceful, like she could have been sleeping, like all of her worries and troubles, secrets and lies, had been wiped clean in that very moment. He had seen her like that once before, when the whole team had been watching a movie and she had fallen asleep.

He might have even thought that she was sleeping, but her skin was waxy and smooth and pale. The skin of the dead, the skin that a zombie might have if it was as pretty as Artemis. And her chest and shoulders weren't moving with every breath that she took.

She was dead.

As he realized that waves of agony crashed over Wally, filling up his lungs so that he couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't do anything but feel the pain. He wanted to kill whoever did this to her, and maybe he had. There had been blood in his trail, after all.

He reached out to touch her face, he wanted to see if it was cold or if it was still warm so he could figure out how long ago she died, to touch her just one last time, but when he made contact, soiled her perfect face with his filthy hands, she disappeared.

And then there was nothing left on the table at all.

.x.

Wally woke up, his heart moving like a frantic hurricane. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears and his sheets were drenched in sweat. His fists were clenched and he loosened them, one finger at a time. He tried to control his breathing and he relaxed all his muscles, counting to ten, then twenty and then fifty when he couldn't get himself to relax.

It was just a dream, it wasn't real, Artemis wasn't dead.

But. But it had felt so real, felt like it could have happened, that maybe one day it might happen. Wally used to not believe in magic, or in fortune telling, but he had seen things this year that made him believe that maybe he was wrong.

So he grabbed his phone, still plugged to the wall while it charged, and opened it up. He didn't even have to look in his contacts anymore. He had dialed this number so many times in the last few weeks, had glanced at the numbers in that pattern, that he had it memorized now.

"Hello?" the voice on the other line said, still groggy and thick with sleep. Her voice was even more raspy than as she tried to throw off hours of sleep to try and answer the phone. Where she was it was an hour earlier, which he always forgot in his panic. "Hello?" she repeated, her voice louder but not any more awake. "This isn't... funny," she said before he could hear the phone get dropped on what he assumed to be her bedside table. It wasn't the floor because, just like every time before when he had called her at three-fifteen in the morning like this, he could still hear her breathing.

Wally listened to that for a while, just the even intakes and outtakes of breath until their phones disconnected. And then he got up and get something to eat.

This happened to him once a week, every week, ever since that training exercise that had taken her away from him, for only a few hours, but it had felt like lifetimes. It had felt like nothing he'd ever experienced before. He was only sixteen years old, he had never felt like this before. Not about anyone or anything.

He'd been willing to kill for her, willing to do whatever it took to get her back until he had realized that she was really and truly dead. And then he woke up, realized that none of it was real.

Only it _was _real. The emotions that he had for her, the way that they lingered behind. He'd told Black Canary that it didn't matter, that it didn't bother him, and for the most part it didn't. And if it did he told himself that it didn't. He knew that he was swimming somewhere in Egypt, but he didn't care. It was better than getting slapped in the face again by feelings that he wasn't even aware existed, better than knowing that he couldn't be trusted if something happened to Artemis. So he put it away.

Except for late at night, when he dreamed that she was dead, so he called her and listened to her voice, the sound of her breathing like he was some sort of creep. These things were proof that she was alive.

Tomorrow, if she bothered to look at her call records, if she even remembered that she had gotten a call in the middle of the night, she'd ask him what his problem was. He'd laugh it off, tell her that sometimes his phone called people randomly, that she was at the top of his contact list because of her name and that he was sorry.

He'd lie and then she'd tell him not to call her, and he'd promise not to. Rinse and repeat. Because as long as he kept having those nightmares, and they didn't seem to be going away any time soon, he'd keep calling her and she'd keep complaining to him for interrupting her eight hours.

But it was worth it.


End file.
